


Heart in Squirming Pieces – a Fairytale

by thatsrightdollface



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Gen, King Joker, M/M, Ruined City, meant to feel kinda dreamlike
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-15
Updated: 2018-04-15
Packaged: 2019-04-23 09:15:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14329281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: They said the clown’s heart had been poisoned, though no one could ever know exactly how.  It was a seeping neon chemical vat that had done it, that’d scorched like judgment day through his skin and left a laughing emptiness in his eyes – sure.  Maybe.  But something else, too, worse by far and maybe even much longer ago.  Something had left the clown’s heart in venom-sticky, squealing little pieces, squirming around in his chest.





	Heart in Squirming Pieces – a Fairytale

**Author's Note:**

> Hello!! :D I hope you enjoy this fic if you read it... It's really self-serving and silly, but I definitely have fun writing things that are supposed to feel like fairy tales? Ahahaha.... Aaaaanyway, have a great day, and thank you for clicking on my story!

They said the clown’s heart had been poisoned, though no one could ever know exactly how.  It was a seeping neon chemical vat that had done it, that’d scorched like judgment day through his skin and left a laughing emptiness in his eyes – sure.  Maybe.  But something else, too, worse by far and maybe even much longer ago.  Something had left the clown’s heart in venom-sticky, squealing little pieces, squirming around in his chest.

It had made his jokes funnier, whatever had happened, he thought – funny and broken like the whole world was funny, and it had left so many dead.  The clown made himself a kingdom of crooked streets and blood scabbed into concrete-cracks like the whole place might’ve been bleeding way down deep inside.  He had a throne twisted out of rusty old crowbars and cheerful, screaming balloon animals, and he painted all the people of that kingdom up to look just like him.  So he knew they got the joke, see?  So he knew they were broken just the same way he was.

At first, the clown had been like a rot spreading through that place, like a chickenpox of the soul, though by the time his shadow changed he had been ruling for quite a long time.  His people ate rock candy for dinner until their teeth were crushed to jagged powder with sweetness still layered thick on their tongues.  Huge parades were held, with singing and slaughter and corpses strung up like puppets…  Swinging along after the cheerleaders so the dancing might never have to end.  The sky had been long ago swallowed up, so, so completely, with a toxic laughing fog that crept around the city and stung against your cheeks if you went outside.  Skyscrapers with cracked windows, and ferris wheels with dead things arranged all pretty in their gondolas, cotton candy bouquets stapled messily into their palms. 

Yes, the clown hadn’t seen any stars for a long time before his shadow changed.  Maybe there weren’t any stars, but they _did_ have a lot of woozy spinning carnival lights.  More than enough to cast a shadow or two, and the clown’s poisoned heart whispered and twitched in his chest so, so restlessly.

The clown’s shadow changed into a bat, is what happened.  Not a bat _exactly_ , though.  A bat-man, whose wings went from a leathery cape and back again just about whenever he wanted them to.  A cape with webs of shadowy veins running through it, the clown might have sworn if there was anything at all he cared about to swear upon. 

At first, the bat-man just followed behind him, like nearly every shadow knew how to do.  But then, it became clearer and clearer that this bat-man was watching everything.  Watching with eyes more primal than the night itself, maybe, eyes that saw farther into the clown’s own maggot-nest of a heart than they had any right to.  No one heard the bat-man as he crept along, always just at the clown’s heel – sometimes swooping in on him from above, though, or stretching out from beneath the ground to grab at his ankle.  No one in the clown’s whole kingdom seemed to notice anything strange, until the first time his shadow stopped him in his work.

He had been using a piece of his throne to pound someone into a musty old carpet, just then – the building they were in might’ve been a hospital waiting room, once, because there were greasy tongue depressors lying around and a lot of magazines blooming into sweet and heavy mold.  The clown had raised his crowbar up to bash in another skull, to watch someone swallow another set of teeth and see if they embraced the hilarious monstrosity of everything they were.  To see if he could find his own face staring back in the poor guy’s expression: his own loss, his own hurting, his own poison-bright eyes.  But the shadow – the bat-man – stretched out a hand like oil, like ice, and grabbed on to the clown’s wrist before he could take that blow.

All those wriggling, broken pieces of the clown’s heart shuddered at the touch of that hand.  He thought maybe his name was on the tip of his tongue.  The name he’d worn before he became a king.  Before he knew how wrong the world was, and how much ruinous doctrine he had left to spread like infection in a wound.   

The man on the ground crawled away, breath gurgling deep in his chest; the clown dropped that piece of his crowbar-throne so it clattered awfully, though of course nothing like as horrible as if he’d actually splintered bones.  He stared at the bat-man as hard as he could.  But he had become just a shadow again, hadn’t he?  Just the clown’s own shadow, as darkly empty as he sometimes thought he’d become himself, somewhere inside. 

Though whatever sort of tricks his shadow was playing, there _were_ still oily fingerprints on clown’s slimy-smile purple coat, and his heart was whining in its little language he’d never taken the time to learn.  There was something missing, in his kingdom.  He knew it, then, though maybe he’d always known it, carried with him like a forgotten history.  He was missing something to struggle against, and something to be.  Something to believe in.  The clown hadn’t believed in anything in such a long, long time, except maybe unraveling.  Except maybe how funny joy-buzzers could be, and the kind of poison-spray flowers that’d make a person bleed from the nose.  Nothing had ever been able to stop the pain he spread in such a long, long time.

The clown had almost forgotten what it’d been like to smear on his clown paint, honestly getting ready to make someone laugh.  But everything new and rotten hurt worse, now that he almost remembered.  The closer those pulpy squirming pieces of his own heart got to stitching themselves back together, the more he wanted to show the world exactly why he had broken.  Show the world its own monstrous face.  His face; the world’s face.  It didn’t matter, it didn’t matter, it didn’t –

It wasn’t as though the clown _knew_ he was trying to draw the bat-man out of hiding, out from the liquid folds of his own shadow.  Not at first.  But, between you and me, he was.  He’d pull stunts that alarmed even those other kingdoms, with everything strangled in poison ivy and velvety mind-control flowers, or with everyone always worn away to heaving breaths and panic, swallowing fear gas like air.  The clown both wanted and despised that thing his shadow had become, that thing that’d kept him from killing when he’d believed nothing else could manage it.  Maybe, one or two of those slithering wet heart-pieces of his didn’t want to be monstrous at all.  At all, at all, at all. 

Whether or not he ever would have admitted it, the clown was begging for that bat-man to come and face him, stop him or lose to him, or everything beautiful and dancing in between.  (Prove him wrong, drag him home.  Put him to bed so he could feel human again.)  Whether or not the clown even knew.

Sometimes his shadow shifted right in front of his gasping, dizzy stricken eyes – sometimes his shadow stayed very still and hidden behind a reflection of his own pointed chin, his own slicked-back hair.  _Then_ the clown called it the most awful names he could think of.  Boring and quiet; innocent and no fun, no fun at all.  Then he brought death in a theatrical flick of his wrist, a scampering of his scuffed-up jester shoes.  It was better when they dueled in that broken city, as if it still had any shred of soul left to save.  A clown fighting his own shadow on the rooftops, always tied together by the very tip of their toes, feeling complete for the first time in possibly, possibly forever.

One night, as they were dancing, the clown crowed his despair to his bat-man just the way he always did…  Only this time, the bat-man answered back.  The clown told him about a hateful world that ground people beneath it barreling on and on and on – forgotten names and foreclosed houses, abandoned families and people dead and dropped by the side of the road like trash flicked out a car window.  He told all his best, worst jokes, you know, and the words were so raw in his throat even after years of screaming them.

But this time, now, the bat-man answered.  He said, “You’re talking about monsters,” and his voice was almost unreal, almost animal – like gravel streets, oily in the dark.  No moon, no humanity.  “But are you saying you _had_ to be a monster, yourself?”

Just before then, the clown had spun a family so frantically in his tilt-a-whirl that their skin flew off in dripping streamers and their insides were splattered around on the cheery amusement park paint.  He was a monster, yes.  Hadn’t always been, though, unless the monster had been waiting under his skin the whole time until he was ready to come out.  Which was what he believed had to be true, now.  What he’d always believed, ever since that face slipped off.

The clown told his shadow about the monster under his skin, and the bat-man said, “Then that’s your doing, isn’t it?  You let him out.”

Their battles were just a little different, then.  The bat-man spoke more often – called accusations, asked for peace and a city rebuilt from its gibbering, sugar-soaked ashes.  The bat-man challenged the clown, and said, “You cannot break me, the way you were broken.  There isn’t a monster behind my mask: I am the only monster I’ve ever been.”

“Well of course,” the clown had quipped, the first time he said a thing like that.  “Before this you were just my own silent shadow, and you never tied me up or freed someone I’d been planning to carve a smile into.  Not even once!”  He didn’t want to see what was behind the shadow’s mask, then, not really…  But when he thought about his bat-man being a true person, a living something beyond himself, those poisoned pieces of his heart almost squeezed back into place.  Almost beat a little real human blood, though it was chilled very cold and thin with a seeping poison.

The clown tried to break his bat-man, yes, of course he did.  If he could do it, that would’ve meant he was right to leave his city how it was, shrieking and scared and possibly dead with its face pressed into one of the muddier gutters – and if he couldn’t, well.  If he couldn’t, it made him feel like a breathing man again.  Made him wonder things like what would happen if he drew his people out of their cowering sewers where they’d hidden from him, out of their mobs and murder-carnivals.  What would happen if he hung the street signs back up and learned another person’s name. 

One night, the bat-man asked, “Did you know this city was called ‘Gotham,’ before you took it from us?”  Another night he asked, “Would you like to know who you were before now?”

The clown said no, no to both those questions.  The clown clutched at the frenzied wriggling of his heart-pieces in his chest, scowling down at his shadow with blood between his teeth.  It tasted too sour, too artificial to be human.

The shadow asked, “Did you know I’m here to save this place, if I can?  Would you like to know _my_ name?” and the clown thought _“But I’ve known you’re the bat-man.  What could you possibly be, that I don’t already know?”_  

And then, the clown realized he could do either of two very strange things. 

He was talking to his own shadow, yes, his own shadow that had stretched out sprawling on the ground at his feet for so many, many years.  But also, he somewhat felt as though he could reach up just then, if he wanted to, and snatch off the shadow’s mask.  Not a mask like the emotional face he’d described before, the good and gentle self he’d shown the world before it curdled and fell off and he became whatever he was now.  No.  But an _actual_ mask, and one that his silky, blood-scabbed gloves could’ve pried away all too easily.  He could see what was underneath the bat-man – his own self smiling back at him, maybe, or a monstrous creature that would melt into the night like sugar in coffee and leave him finally shadowless.  Or maybe, maybe a man.  Maybe a stranger that wasn’t a stranger, with worried human eyes and very breakable bones. 

The clown wondered if he could’ve been in love with a shadow, with a man like that who _became_ a shadow.  Who haunted his city, and tried to wrestle it away from a monster…  Who still believed there was something real in that monster’s self, something worth speaking to.  He wondered, and decided yes, if he could be in love with anything at all it might’ve had to be that.

And maybe, if the clown swept his shadow’s mask off…  If he ended the fight up there on the rooftop, with broken stained glass under his feet and wailing-bright carnival lights in his eyes…  His heart might breathe a deep and quieting sigh.  It might stop whispering and decide to behave a little more like other hearts did.  The pieces might blend together, finally, until he could imagine what it was like to be whole.

That was _one_ choice. 

One world the clown could’ve created, just then, and worn around like a new favorite hat. 

Here’s the other one:

The clown could have laughed, so that all the slithering pieces of his heart laughed with him, and he could have thrown a little confetti grenade he had ready and waiting in his pocket.  He could have started their dance up again, still nameless, still struggling, until the rest of that city sank back into their swamp.  Into their labyrinthine sewers; into their gory red earth.

The clown felt that laugh twitching at the edges of his lips, as he stared tenderly at that hollow place where he thought his shadow’s eyes might have been and made his choice.


End file.
